Posted
by
timothy
on Thursday April 11, 2013 @03:16PM
from the no-wireless-less-space-than-a-nomad-lame dept.

bdking writes "Google says it plans to ship its Google Glass Explorer Edition by the end of April to developers and consumers who paid $1,500 to test the computer-enabled eyewear, with vague plans for a general release (at a lower price) by year's end. But what will you really be able to do with Google Glass, beyond having information presented before your eyes? Even investors who are set to spend millions funding apps development for Google Glass have no clue. Is Google Glass being overhyped as a 'transformational' device?" I bet every real estate agent in the world would like one of these hooked up to a database of houses for sale, so they could instantly scan all the relevant information.

I don't know what Google Glass is really for either, except possibly furthering the universal surveillance of everything in the universe by another unwelcome step -- or not, because even people who normally don't think about or ignore this kind of privacy issue still tend to react with hostility when the creepiness is overt.

I think there's going to be a large chunk of people impulse buying it based on what they simply think it can do. The public perception of glass was in large part created way before the actual reality of it was demonstrated. A lot of those people will have enough money that they'll have no problem buying it without doing any real research first. That said, I'm sure there's a fair amount of people who'll buy it because they actually do want some of the features it offers. God knows I've seen enough facebook feeds with people snapping pictures of mundane things to know there's a market for making that easier for them.

Not an accelerometer -- that doesn't have anything to do with heading. For wearable heading you have two options: a full 6 degree-of-freedom inertial platform, or a magnetometer. Well, there's a third option - phase-differential GPS, but that only works outdoors, with no tall buildings around, and it would be the most expensive to develop as they'd need it done custom as none of the off-the-shelf "tiny" modules support anything like it. You really need to feed input from two antennas, separated by a known distance, to the receiver, and compare the phase of the incoming signals to determine which way the baseline is pointing. For wearable heading, a magnetometer is pretty much "it". Oh, and it tends to have problems when you're on the boundary to large steel structures. In a high rise building, you'd be OK when inside, but would face lower accuracy near the walls and when going in/out of the building. And so on.

If it has a camera, it'd be quite doable to "compare" the image it sees to Google Street View imagery from the vicinity, and use that to determine not only your heading, but pretty much solve the full 6 degree of freedom head position/orientation combo.

It is not a phone, it has (or shouldnt or will evolve to) no comunications capabilities beyond connecting to your already existing phone. It is a display, a voice gatherer and an api for your phone.

Its posibilities, if my assumptions are right, are endless and i do think that, done right, it could be a game changer. However, I also think nobody copies shit better than apple. If this works, you can be sure the iEyeEye (ay ay ay), will be simpler, stupider and more loved.

Leave it on continuously and tell me how long your phone's battery lasts. Constantly polling the camera and other sensors and overlaying that data correctly enough to be useful (and for something like driving it has to be damn near perfect to be safe) will drain a battery of that size in a few minutes.

This tech is being held back by the same limiting factor by which all mobile tech is being held back: batteries. Batteries are terrible. They've been terrible for a long time and barely gotten better. It takes

When I am in the car, my battery should never deplete. My car surely makes enough electrical power for this task.

Phones today could have much longer battery lives if we did not sacrifice all the alter of thin. My galaxy nexus is more comfortable to hold with the extended battery pack. The entire device could be that thick and it would allow even more battery life.

But your point about the battery in your car seems wrong. Are you going to have a power cable dangling off your head plugged into the cigarette lighter? We are talking about augmented reality in the context of Google Glass, which will be on your head. A power cable seems like a non-starter in that form factor. It has to be battery powered when in use, and that means limiting what it can do.

I disagree. I'd put a battery in my pocket and a cord to my glassses. It seems like 50% of people walking around have a cord to their ears already from a device in their pocket. I don't see all the focus on cordless when we are used to corded earbuds, and most of the cordless headsets flounder in the market place.

Driving is when I want augmented reality the most. Give me a GPS overlay with directions and when it gets dark/foggy/rainy give me vision in other spectrum. Display my current speed and the legal limit where I am, basically I want a damn HUD.

Google Glass won't be capable of AR because the display is only designed to cover a very small part of your entire field of vision. It can pop up information in one corner of your vision and that's it.

Maybe they'll come out with a version that's more like real glasses, i.e. mostly/fully covering your field of view the way glasses do, but that doesn't seem to be in the offing yet.

There's already laws about driving while distracted. It's just that for most people "distracted" is something that is hard to define. So they have to come up with very specific laws about what exact kinds of distractions you aren't allowed to do. Personally I never felt that safe driving while talking one the phone. And it's not that I'm a bad driver, I just realize how distracted I get when I'm on the phone.

I don't know what kind of an idiot you are, but it doesn't take a rocket scientist to figure out that our visual system does not support texting and driving. As in, you know, the central vision is the only thing with decent resolution -- the only thing that in fact support conscious processing of imagery that has meanings that have to be decoded. That's why you constantly relocate your central vision while you read. If it has meaning that has to be picked up, the central vision must get to it. So, in order to look at a cell phone you're moving the central vision smack onto the cellphone's display. The cellphone's display is likely to be in a location where the peripheral vision -- the realtime, absent-of-meaning parallel-processing vision of ours -- will not be targeted at the windows and windshield. Thus you make yourself effectively blind for the purposes of driving. That's why texting and driving is so bad -- when you text, you're a blind person driving the car. It's that easy. Things are perhaps a bit more acceptable if you have a tactile keyboard on your phone and know how to use it without looking at the phone *at all*, but you're still redirecting your conscious attention to processing of the text you're writing, and that's bad in and of itself as I'll explain in the last two paragraphs.

As for talking on the cellphone while driving: well, most people, in the U.S. at least, have to hold their cell in their head, or support it with the shoulder, etc. Again it doesn't take a genius to figure out that you're altering your posture sufficiently so that your external field of view becomes crippled, and you're unable to execute head saccades. Saccades are the fast motions of the eye that redirect the gaze to a new point of interest. When a saccade is large enough, it gets executed in tandem by your neck muscles and your eye muscles. If it's even larger, your entire body participates in the motion -- and it's pretty damn cool that all those stacked motion stages can still execute a saccade that ends up at most a couple of visual degrees away from the intended target. All this goes to hell when you have a cellphone to deal with -- either between your head and your shoulder, or between your head and your hand. Again -- you're making yourself partially blind in the areas of peripheral vision that would normally elicit a shift of visual attention.

Oh, so what about the hands-free sets? Again, it doesn't take a rocket scientist. You've got an extra thing on your head to worry about if you wear a headset. Any sort of an out-of-normal situation (slipping headset, change of settings, etc) will for a moment monopolize your conscious attention. If you're using the car hands-free set, those are the worst. The audio quality is worse, so more of your conscious attention needs to be redirected to what was an automated task: decoding the meaning of words. The worse the audio quality, the more conscious processing is required to deal with a task that in normal conditions is purely automatic once you're around age 5. I don't think I need to convince you that depriving yourself of serial conscious processing is good while driving. The conscious attention is a serial resource -- it can only do one thing at a time. Yes, arguably driving depends a lot on sub-conscious processing -- since this is the only kind of processing we have available that's fast and real time -- that's why you can't drive a bicycle just knowing the physics of it, your conscious processing is way too slow.

But, in spite of most driving being done by the hugely parallel sub-conscious processing, you do need to do some ahead-planning to cope with changing weather and road conditions. If you completely redirect your conscious attention at the phone conversation, you may end up rear-ending someone -- for a simple reason. The conscious processing is used to keep the driving model up-to-date so that your learned sub-conscious "reflexes" keep you driving at a correct speed, in the correct lane, at a correct distance from the car(s) ahead of you. Once there

Yep -- they were driving on an "empty road". The conscious brain was monopolized by the conversation or texting and didn't even have a chance to notice the person on the road. Part of the problem is that our learned driving doesn't normally include obstacle avoidance -- we have no reflexes to avoid a person on the road, thus without the conscious attention paid to it, we just don't.

It's interesting: obstacle avoidance is not something you do every day, so you never learn it enough to get your automatic brai

Google has made it clear that making Glass minimally distracting is a major design goal. Showing advertising on it doesn't mesh well with that. Obviously advertising is Google's main business and it's reasonable to assume Glass feeds into that somehow, but I suspect it's for data collection, not display of ads.

I really don't think masses will tolerate always-on advertising in a classical banner-video format in the visual field space. Plus liability that would come when people start claiming accidents on distraction.

Advertising will have to be done via shaping your information feed and not by distracting or grabbing your attention.

One word: advertising. Right in front of your eyes is the most prime advertising space I can imaine.

Bzzt. Wrong target.

Advertising yes, but not to the user. The user is merely a tool to capture the goings on and identities of everyone else. Couple with GPS and other sensors and facial recognition, Google would now have a more complete picture of you.

So if a Glass user catches you walking out of a bar, you can find new Google ads for bars, ladies and other things around that area when you surf the web.

So yes, advertising, but it's putting more effective advertising in front of more people. Glass users will be few, but they'll be able to collect more information about more people than ever before.

Heck, if a Glass user catches you walking out of a porn store, Google can then prompt you if you want to turn off safe search the next time you visit it.

This is nothing more than a head mounted smartphone, with less features.

It'll probably take a bit of time in the hands of some crazy members of the public before we see any really innovative things out of this.

Personally, I don't see the big deal, its really just a head mounted smarth phone. Just a slightly different form factor, but due to its single display, a bad one unless you like headaches. But... thats usually said a lot just before something groundbreaking happens:)

Your mentality is that of an Apple consumer, not that of an inventor. You tell the corporations "tell me how I should use your product". My crowd tells them "show me what your product does, I'll decide if I have a use for it". In my world, iPads are complete crap - they're an appliance for Grandma that I can't connect my 1-wire scanner to, because it doesn't even have a USB port. On the other hand, an Arduino or cheap 3-D printer is a godsend. Google Glass is meant for me, not for you.

As soon as Glass hits a good price point and works with QR codes, that's my next inventory solution. Put on your glasses and look at the QR code on a server, get a readout of what it is and who the point of contact is. Oh wait, your glasses just popped up the status from the SQL database "DO NOT POWER DOWN, LARGE UPDATE IN PROGRESS". Or when maintenance looks at the QR code on an HVAC controller, it pops up the web page to access it.

You have no imagination, that's why you don't understand that this is just the first step to the rig in "Virtual Light" (fingers eagerly crossed). It has been so long since a large company did innovation for the sake of innovation, that nowadays it's an alien concept.

"When the inventor can't easily explain what the best uses for their invention are, "how naive.

In the hardware industry, the best application seldom come from the company that developed it. Best game seldom come the the console makers, then best application for the iPad didn't come from Apple, and so on.

Honestly, I didn't feel after the Stevenote like I knew what the iPad was for any more than I felt I knew what Google Glasses was for after watching the video they produced. In fact, in many ways they're similar: devices that duplicate the functionality of an existing object (a laptop/netbook vs a smartphone) using a radically different user interface.

And just as I felt "Yeah, but the iPad's going to feel like crap the moment someone actually tries to do any serious writing or whatever on it", I felt "Yeah, Google Glasses is going to be a hell of a lot less interesting when it's being used in a cubicle at work for seven and a half hours a day, rather than when I skydive out of a plane and quickly take a picture and share it with seven friends using Google+"

The iPad comparison does seem apt. It appears, at any rate, to be a crappy way of doing the things it's advertised as being for compared to the existing tools for the job, but it may be slick enough, and its UI friendly enough, that it doesn't matter what it appears to be.

There will be a few real-world uses for Glass that are positive and cost-effective. For the vast majority, this device is a non-starter at any price, IMO. If you want to walk around pretending you're in a sci-fi movie, yeah, it's probably great if you're a 14-year-old, but most people aren't going to have a use for this AND they're not going to want to be seen wearing it AND it's not going to be socially acceptable. Once again, this is technology desperately in search of a problem to solve to justify its existence.

I still look at people oddly when they talk on a blue-tooth headset, because it looks like they're talking to themselves. A lot of women I know won't even wear reading glasses because they don't like the way they look, even though they spent $700 on the designer frames. The conformity factor is quite high for most people.

In a previous life, I spent a lot of time hang gliding. Competition and Cross-Country pilots have to hang multiple instruments on their control bars - variometers, GPS's, radios - to maximize their performance. This is a problem area, as the $1000 worth of instruments are in an easily damaged location which also reduces performance due to air drag.

Google Glass would be a huge advancement here - stick your $200 cell phone where it gets good reception and is protected, use it for GPS, mapping, and communications functions, add a small cheap variometer interfaced to your phone. You'll have far better information, your instruments will be cheaper and your software will be vastly better, and your physical performance will improve by taking all that stuff out of the airstream.

This, I think, is an example of the niche markets that no marketer in his right mind would build a product to meet, but combined with 1000 other niches could start to make the product ubiquitous./frank

I want my speed, distance and map in a heads up display when bicycling. My smartphone does that except for the heads up display but that part is pretty important since looking down means I'm missing a lot of the stuff that I need and want to see.

I'd also like to have it provide one of the video feeds from the person speaking during company video conferences. We have multiple feeds but having one coming from the speaker, or potentially letting the speaker see someone remotely asking questions would add a goo

I work Helldesk. I can see a use for a display like that: Display alerts of network status and pending tickets. Now technicians can be much faster in their response time. The same thing would work for, say, shelf-stackers or cleaners in a store: Have it bring up alerts telling them what needs stocking in real time. A considerable boost in worker efficiency, which in turn means fewer workers. If the store can lay off just one employee, the savings will easily pay for giving the rest google glass and having a

Google Glass doesn't just present information; it can record, too. And if you record every little thing you see, it's possible to review and discover small, but critically important events later. For example, one of my college instructors has a child with autism. Video from his child's second birthday party helped make the diagnosis, but more and earlier footage would have helped diagnose it sooner. If my instructor had been wearing and recording with Google Glass every time he saw or watched his child, he would have had a wealth of material for evaluation and diagnosis.

Oh, that's going to be a legal minefield. You've obviously got all the fun of state laws on recording conversations, for a start - do you need to have everyone you talk to agree to be recorded? Then there is the possibility of the records being used in legal proceedings against you - not just run-ins with the government, but civil cases too. Child custody, for example: If you and your ex lived together with these things for a year raising a child, you'll both have a rich library of footage that could be edi

I could see that thing being awesome for golf... they already do GPS through smart phones.. if it can tell you how far away an object is in your field of vision, pretty darn spiffy.. show you a trail where your ball went, display your swing trajectory in your field of view for analysis... lots of cool things. Plus golfers will spend that kind of money.

If so, I would want these for skiing, running, biking & so on. Otherwise, I would just pull out the phone to look at it. BTW, I am not a 24/7 phone junkie at all. But for example when skiing with family & friends, texting and calling is a big pain, but a heads-up display would be perfect.

Google Glass is for:
-- tracking, nonstop, of every place you go (and if you're visit the bathroom, every place you go to go) and how long you stay there (hmm, in the bathroom that could tell them if you're going #1 or #2, eh? or will they just turn on the hidden microphone to listen for the tinkle-splash noises to figure that out?)
-- your random path (how fidgety you are when you are certain places, like do you stay put in ladies' wear, then swing by shoes in the deparment store before heading over to

Given the...how to put this politely... 'strongly habituated'... cellphone-checking among a large number of people, I'd say that the closest analogy would probably be selling infusion pumps to heroin junkies.

By making 'pulling out your phone and compulsively checking it all the goddamn time, even when in company' entirely seamless and automatic, Glass allows you to indulge your vices even further, while exhibiting the formerly required movements much less often...

I thought Sergei's(deeply weird) comments about being 'emasculated' by his phone were actually sort of telling with regards to the strange contradiction underlying the 'Glass' concept.

So, Sergei comes to the realization that damn do I spend a lot of my life, even when I'm ostensibly doing other things, basically poking at the little colored lights that live inside my cellphone, what am I doing? However, instead of adopting the "Hmm, maybe I should try doing less of that" approach, he goes for the "I know, I'll build a system where I no longer find myself clutching my cellphone alarmingly frequently; because it's hovering in front of my eye all the time!".

For all the privacy fear-mongering, Google-is-a-big-scary-company-and-therefore-evil vibe, and disdain for dorkiness, this is probably the first bit of critisism that I actually understand.

The smartphone zombies are getting to be a problem and I'm not sure society is ready for people to be even further removed in their day-to-day life. On the plus side, I know the battery life on this thing isn't going to let them wander that much so they'll probably gravitate to charging stations and/or heroin dens.

Is the reality of technology that is truly transformational that you can't define what it's for... the smartphone is transformational tech but nobody realized that when it was first created, it was just a phone that could save your contact list and run a few games to kill time. so nobody asked if it was being over hyped it just got sold as a phone with additional features. Nobody asked what graphene is for, another transformational tech advance that is finding dozens of uses that it's creators never envi

Not so. Dumb mobile phones were obvious to everyone from the start. Everyone had experience of landlines and could imagine the same, but without a wire to tether it. Smartphones came quite a while after PDAs, so it was perfectly obvious that smartphones were a mix of PDAs and mobile phones. Applications were obvious.

Google glass is a different category. You'd do better to compare it with the Segway.

And it's not a HUD. HUDs display in your field of vision. This is a display out of the normal field of vision.

It's so people in social situations and even strangers can instantly identify assholes by the little light on their glasses which shows they're more interested in their email or augmented naked boobie apps than their physical surroundings.

Facial recognition software can pull up names from the library of tagged images in social networks, never forget who that person is or where you met them again.

Chuckle uncontrollably for seemingly no reason at all to those around you as friends send you the latest funny pic they've discovered.

While riding through town (as a passenger I hope) you can see the sales shop owners have posted on their Google Earth coupon layer. Could you do that with a phone? Yes, but you won't stare constantly through th

While shopping it would be kinda of clever while looking at product numbers if it showed me competing prices on amazon/walmart/etc. Or when I'm at the library it would read the ISBN and display other titles by the author... or when travelling abroad it could offer a translation of items on a menu.

This is absolute bullshit. If anyone who approved this fucking article knew what they were talking about, they would know that Google held a Glass developer conference wherein they explain the capabilities of Glass, guidelines, and API abilities.

Fucking idiots. The entire Mirror API is explained in that video. Developers(or anyone) who have done a simple Google search know how the hell to develop for Glass right now, why doesn't the author of this/. post?

As a DIY kinda guy who does his own auto maintenance, fixes stuff around his house, cooks, assembles toys for his kid, etc, the immediate thing that would absolutely make me buy one of these is just the ability to present instructions in front of my face without me having to look away from what I'm doing.

How many times have I been looking at my engine and gotten lost thinking, "Wait, was that bolt on the left side or the right side?" and had to stop and reach for the manual or the instructions I had loaded up on my tablet. Or been holding three pieces of baby furniture together with one hand while rummaging through my tool belt to get the right screws and then realized "crap, does this part take the long screw or the medium long screw?" and had to put the whole thing back down to reach for the instructions. If I had a hands-free display showing me the instructions it would be way easier.

And the instructions don't even need to be digitized already and downloaded from the manufacturer's website. Glass has a camera, so before I get started, look at the instructions and snap a few high-res pics.

Eventually, if such devices penetrate the market there might be a reason to use those QR codes. Companies could put out "Glass Enabled Instructions" where each part has a small code on it, so when you get to "Insert Rod A into Flange B" the instructions app would scan your visual field for the correct marker code on Rod A and give you a thumbs up. Which gives you all kinds of other applications for general education and training.

Also, whenever I'm taking something apart, I find myself grabbing my phone to snap pictures during the disassembly, so when it comes time to stick all the color-coded but otherwise unmarked wires back into the posts on the PCB I have a quick reference for what it looked like when I started. With Glass, fuck, not only could I take stills without rummaging for my phone, I could just record a video of the whole process and then scrub back through it if I was unsure of how anything fit together during reassembly.

I too would love that but the problem is it would require a terrific amount of data entry and modeling for a small return. At best we'll end up with Ikea instructions and most stuff will still include poorly translated Chinese.

I bet every real estate agent in the world would like one of these hooked up to a database of houses for sale, so they could instantly scan all the relevant information.

Is a smartphone with GPS not able to do any of this? How would Google Glass be anymore accurate than a GPS to be able to overlay the information properly as opposed to an "AR" app on a phone?

Maybe it could be useful for some things, especially games, but even in that situation, not having a HUD or anything distracting on the screen is seen as a benefit, so why would you want it IRL? Maybe it could be arranged into something more useful to you personally such as widgets on a desktop, but I can whip out my

Once this sort of thing is good enough then augmented reality will be the killer app.

Imagine driving in your car with the GPS route you need to take overlaid onto the actual road, or repairing your car/computer/whatever with instructions pointing to each part to remove/replace in sequence along with tips on how to properly do it. Imagine meeting people and seeing their name and a brief biography floating in between you. Virtual geo-tagging left at physical landmarks by previous people. Heck, I could see

I don't know what the future holds for Google Glass, but I know one thing for sure: Marc Andreessen should not be bald. [nytimes.com] I'm pretty sure I saw him in a movie with Dan Aykroyd and Jane Curtain twenty years ago...

The reaction to Google Glass reminds me of the first tablet push over 10 years ago. The so-called experts dismissed it as pointless. They couldn't see beyond the current technological limitations and appreciate the massive potential in the technology.

Sure, those tablets had limitations. The resistive touch screen left a lot to be desired and Windows XP wasn't really tablet friendly. But the first time, years before the iPad came along, Sony tablet in hand as I sat on a subway in Asia, browsing the web on Wi

Of course this is a hype. A well-crafted hype by Google Marketing ( TM ). I currently work for a logistics company where two or three motivated students developed exactly that: a pair of glasses with which one can walk through a warehouse and pick orders, from info displayed before your eyes. The things also allow you to log in to our software, and to look up where exactly you are in the warehouse. No hype needed.

For driving, it's the ultimate heads-up display: anything that can be displayed on a screen can be displayed overlaid on your actual field of view without you having to take your eyes off the road. Vehicle speed, a compass, GPS navigation indications. Even an actual map so you can see a bird's-eye view of the next few blocks worth of street. One thing I can see is integrating a couple of cameras into the system to give real-time speed or closure-rate readouts on surrounding cars or warnings of cars coming u

In the anime series Dennou Coil in which kids adapted to such glasses far more easily than the adults, people had virtual pets. Should be easy enough to re-release a modernized Tamagatchi app for this thing. (Or even better, have a flashing light remind you it's time to water your plants and walk your dog.)

1. Will these glasses display only what I want them to display?2. Will the sensors of these glasses only record what I want them to record?3. Will the data outputs only transmit the data that I want them to forward, and only to the devices, networks or other targets that I specify?3. Will the specifications be open enough to develop a driver for whatever appliance I want them to interface with?

A "no" to either of this question will mean a "no thank you" (put the comma where you prefer it) from me.

don't know about you but if i'm going to buy a home i want to see it. i want to touch the walls and go into the basement to check for mold and any problems that might come up. i want to see how much sun there is. i want to make sure the walls actually block some sound. but then again i have noticed that the more expensive something is, the scummier the sales process is.

the photos on the website are there so i don't waste my time visiting something i would never buy.this is why banks still require ho

You've got it all backwards. Do you even know that the topic is Google Glass?If you were looking at a home, you'd go there, and put on the glasses, and walk around and do your tour. The glasses could provide you with additional info on the house, and could also record your experience so the agent had a peak at what you were doing (likes/dislikes/etc).

I'm not saying it's a good idea, but it's not the non-existent idea you were debating:-)

I have met a grand total of exactly one real estate agent who actually knew what the crap he was talking about. My favorite was an agent who, because we didn't show up to see the unit we called him to see right on time (we were like 2 minutes late), decided he had misremembered, and drove all the way across town because he thought we wanted to see a unit all the way across town, and didn't answer his cell phone until he got there. But that kind of incompetence was rampant, that was just the funniest mi